The invention is in the field of rehabilitation, and more specifically relates to rehabilitation of the various joints, bones, and connective tissue in the lower extremities.
Recently, awareness of functional rehabilitation has increased substantially. More than ever before, physical therapists are turning to functional conditioning to rehabilitate their patients. Beyond merely resting in bed and waiting to heal, actually exercising the portion of the body that is being rehabilitated has proven to be vastly superior in many situations. Putting the injured portion of the body through the motions that it would ordinarily experience in daily life, beginning very slowly and increasing until full functionality is achieved, has proven to be a generally optimal rehabilitation procedure.
Motivating this trend back to real-life, or "functional" rehabilitation has been the study of the differences between open-chain and closed-chain functions of human movement, and how each satisfies a specific rehabilitation need. The terms "open-chain", and "closed-chain", refer, respectively to dangling one's leg over the edge of a table and swinging it back and forth, for example, as opposed to actually standing on that leg. "Open-chain" movement does not usually reproduce the actual movements or the weight-bearing experienced in real life. For this reason, today open-chain exercises are no longer being emphasized for lower extremity rehabilitation.
This practical, new results-oriented rehabilitation technique has produced a need for exercise equipment that makes possible these natural, functional exercise patterns for the rehabilitation patient. However, there is a difficulty when attempting to use natural human movements in a closed-chain fashion to rehabilitate the lower extremities. That is, when walking, for example, the patient must put his whole body weight on the leg that is being rehabilitated unless he uses a walker or some other body deloading crutch. For example, wobble boards on a flat surface are used to exercise an ankle that is being rehabilitated. If the ankle cannot take the full weight of the patient, the above-mentioned deloading support structure must be available.
As closed-chain functional rehabilitative conditioning continues to advance, there is a need for increasingly advanced rehabilitating equipment that permits the advantages of closed-chain exercise, while enabling the ankle, foot muscles, or other bone, joint or connective structure in the lower extremities to be conditioned.